Celebrating the Twisted Genius of Soldier Humor

Featuring a guy who used all the white trash names from Ted to plan a military operation.

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The night before a potentially dicey mission to the heart of Taliban-controlled territory, U.S. soldiers run through their battle plan using a room-sized map of a remote village drawn on a plywood floor.

Capt. Frank Phillips calls the ball, placing soldiers along the winding road etched with marker and calling out the woman's names assigned to each maneuver. When the captain says a name, the troops pivot and shift to a new locale. "Shauna" is code for when helicopters circle overhead. "Tammy, Tory, Taylor" signals the men to get back to their vehicles, mount up and get out of the hot-zone.

Planning a mission like this is serious business. The Taliban gave a small group of U.S. Special Forces a hell of time there just recently. But for some reason some of the guys are snickering. It takes me a minute longer than the rest to figure out why: Phillips used Mark Wahlberg's already classic recitation of white-trash women's names from the movie Ted as call signs.

I grab a copy of the printout of the mission plan for confirmation. Lo and behold the canon of trashy names made famous by Seth McFarlane's movie is staring me in the face, from "Brandy, Heather, Channing, Brianna, Amber," all the way to "Kendra, Kylie, Chloe, Devon, Emmalou" and "fuckin' Becky."

"I watched it again while we were planning this," Phillips told me with a straight face.

As I learned over the years covering combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, humor—often dark, absurd, and/or twisted—is essential for the preservation of sanity at war. Without it, the daily threat of snipers, ambushes or dismemberment by IEDS would drive even the most hardened soldier around the bend.

A couple of years ago I was embedded with a company at combat outpost Pirtle King in eastern Afghanistan, a small base subject to regular hounding from snipers tucked in the mountains surrounding them on all sides. Amid the chaos of war and constant threat of death, I watched them laugh at hardships unimaginable to most: no showers for weeks on end, awful food and not enough of it, and the aforementioned threat of Taliban attack every time they left the wire.

They cracked wise about their plight and joked about the stupid uniform regulations they had to follow, like not rolling up your sleeves even though its 90-plus degrees and while wearing 100 pounds of gear. The worse the situation got, the more they laughed. Every time I tried to catch them in a candid moment, the jokesters among the company would strike faux-hardass poses that fucked up my photos.

"I think it's a mask sometimes—to act like everything is okay," said Jeff Hutchins, who was a combat medic at Pirtle King and class-clown extraordinaire. During a foot patrol deep in the mountains, I saw Hutchins slip and tumble headfirst down a rocky slope. When he popped up with his helmet askew and covering his eyes, asking if it was crooked, we could barely contain our laughter—which was problematic given the first imperative was to not alert the Taliban to our presence.

Hutchins, a caregiver by nature, said he would crack wise to bolster to mood of his fellow soldiers in a place where the enemy could strike any minute. "I knew other guys were scared. Well, maybe not scared, but everyone knew that every time we went out (outside the base) that this could be our last mission."

During the final days of his deployment, Hutchins was in an armored vehicle that hit an IED. He suffered bilateral femur fractures that had him using a walker, then a cane, for months. Looking back, the now-23-year-old can still laugh at their exploits. "We were all just a bunch of young punks," he said laughing. "Twenty-four-seven we were clowning around."

A year later I traveled to Helmand Province, a notorious stronghold for the Taliban's fiercest fighters. I embedded with Marines who foot patrolled along narrow paths through farmers' fields riddled with IEDS. The Marines, who pride themselves on their toughness, and revel in hardships most others would find insufferable, marched affably along the paths that seemed to me ideal for an ambush. As they sauntered, I shook and sweated, trying to keep my video camera straight and in focus.

When we arrived at a small mud-walled compound where we would spend the night, the soldiers unloaded their packs and settled down to play some cards. One of them produced an iPod and put on the Rebecca Black song "Friday" in celebration of the week's end, a tune so teeth-grindingly annoying that you can't help but sing along as it burrowed into your subconscious like an earwig.

Amid banter about which pop star was more bang-able, and ball-busting over who's the worst Spades player, their talk turned to whether it was better to get your legs or arms blown off. Around thirty percent of their company had already been injured during their deployment, several of them losing at least one limb. One Marine was a sent home a triple amputee. "As long as my dick doesn't get blown off, I can live without my legs," said Sgt. David Sowell in a long, Texas drawl. The others laughed and nodded in agreement, playing cards well into the night before bedding down for a couple of hours of sleep with little protection from the gun-toting boogeymen lurking in the dark.

Reporters that spend a lot of time around troops know well this sometimes-cavalier attitude toward death and dismemberment—and the comical heights soldiers will go to—to bury their fears. Tom Peter, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, spent an entire year with U.S. forces in Iraq's Diyala Province, in 2006, a time when civil war had engulfed large swaths of the country.

During that time he got to know the guys more intimately than he ever imagined possible, bearing witness to ample amounts of genitalia-based humor. Peter recalls the popularity at the time of the movie Waiting starring Ryan Reynolds and an assemble cast of jokesters that would play what they called "the penis game" whereby you would trick someone into looking at your exposed junk, and, if successful, win a chance to hit them as hard as you can.

"They thought it was the greatest thing ever," said Peter. "It got to the point where you would be out on a mission with them and the gunner would take out his fucking scrotum and just have it hanging out of his pants while he was driving around. You're driving through areas that could be hostile or hit an IED and a guy's dick is hanging out in your face."

"Thankfully we were not," he added. "That could have been problematic."

When I first started covering wars, I couldn't understand this attitude—how some soldiers could remain so seemingly nonchalant in the face of death and dismemberment. I figured their bravado an act for my benefit so that they might come across as hardened warriors in my stories. But after years spent chronicling their fight I discovered they danced the fine line between humor and carelessness so that they might go home with both their bodies and minds intact.

"There were times that we were en route to help another platoon in heavy contact on the road—all the while discussing the proper sound of a blow job as conducted by our favorite porn stars," said Capt. Antonio Salinas, a veteran of combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and the author of the book Siren's Song: The Allure of War.

"The reality is that modern warriors bullshit, joke, and laugh to prepare ourselves for the potential crossing into death. We bullshit as if we were in the dugout and drunk at a neighborhood softball game."

Some even revel in the danger, experiencing unbridled joy at getting shot at and living to tell about it. During a patrol with U.S. forces in northern Iraq back in 2005, I was riding in the lead humvee through the narrow streets of a pro-Saddam stronghold town called Hawijah. In the distance we hear an ominous "pop" followed by a whooshing sound that grew louder in fractions of a second.

"RPG, RPG, twelve o'clock," Spc. John Alden shouted from behind the wheel, as the rocket headed toward the driver's side, before veering off course, hitting the pavement a few feet away, ricocheting off the ground and exploding.

Alden gunned the truck toward some men about a hundred yards away who jumped in a four-door sedan and sped off. A cacophony of rebel yells and whoops filled the truck as the seven-and-a-half ton vehicle sideswiped parked cars that tipped to one side and landed in slightly mangled heaps on cracked axles.

The assailants turned a corner and vanished from our sight. When our truck arrived moments later, the car was abandoned. All four doors were open, its occupants scattered into Hawijah's labyrinthine alleyways. Sniper fire rang out, peppering the vehicles. Blackhawks circled overhead until they eyeballed a suspect.

Disappointed they'd lost their attackers, the soldiers' sprits were buoyed when they discovered in the car a sniper rifle, the RPG launcher, Iraqi ID cards, and a video camera containing footage of the attack. The soldiers gasped at the footage, then laughed when the shooter missed the truck and the pursuit began. We played it a half dozen times for fellow soldiers who couldn't believe our fortune and busted their balls over letting the perpetrators slip away.

"We've needed this day for so long," a young lieutenant told me smiling, noting how hard his men had fought against an elusive enemy that often emerged from the shadows, struck, then disappeared without a trace.

Rattled by the first of many near calamities I experienced while covering wars, I started to understand the lieutenant's exuberance. Skirting a close one calls for a good laugh, if only to keep you from cracking up.